Quote:
Originally Posted by cheerfulgreek
RU OX Alum and greekchef you both make valid points, but I seriously have yet to see a successful prediction about the physical world that was from the content of any religious document. It just seems like whenever people have tried to make accurate predictions about the physical world using religious documents they've been wrong. When I say prediction I'm talking about a precise statement about the untested behavior of objects or phenomena in the natural world long before the event takes place. Another thing I've noticed are the perennial claims about when the world will end, none of which have yet proved true.
At one time people actually believed that the Earth was the center of the universe, and that was because the creation of the Earth was aligned with the teachings of the Catholic Church and prevailing interpretations of the Bible, where Earth is created before the Sun and the Moon as described in the 1st several verses of Genesis. So, if you were created 1st, then you pretty much have to be the center of all motion. I mean where else could you be? Also the Sun and Moon were described to be smooth celestial bodies. But if you look through a telescope, you can see the Moon's surface is bumpy and rocky, the Sun has spots that move across its surface, Jupiter has moons of it's own that orbit around it and not Earth as once believed, and Venus goes through phases just like the moon. I don't want you guys to think I'm not a believer because I am, I just see contraditions that I'm curious about. Also, I'm not trying to imply that scientist haven't been wrong, because they have. Most scientific claims made will be disproved, due primarily to bad or incomplete data. I just think the conflict between science and religion exist because there are fields in which there's significant overlap between the claims of science and those of religion. It's just that it seems like the conflict between the two are also in some areas of physics, and in geology and biology because these sciences are pretty much sort of bound up with theories that provide natural, non religious explainations of the origins and development of the world as we experience it.
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My head hurts.
Science and religion ask different, but complementary, questions. If you're talking about creation (which is what you mainly seem to be talking about), science asks how the world came into being. Religion asks why -- was there a purpose, was there a creator? As many, many religious scientists would tell you, you're asking for trouble if you expect religious writings written millenia ago to have a modern scientific understanding. That misses the point completely.
To quote Anna Leonowens in The King and I: "The Bible was not written by men of science, but by men of faith. It was their explanation of the miracle of creation, which is the same miracle whether it took six days or many centuries."
And yeah, Mac's post was classic.